A ‘make and mend’ afternoon*

This afternoon I had a couple of hours of uninterrupted time to myself, and so I decided to take stock of what needed to be sorted out, tidied up, and put away in my wargames room.

I try to keep the room reasonably tidy, and to put things away after I have used them, but inevitably some bits and pieces get left lying about, and other stuff – for example model kits that might have been put to one side for a project that has yet to come to fruition – have begun to pile up on the available flat surfaces. When this happens – and before my wife can complain about the mess – I have a big tidy-up session.

So far I have ‘re-discovered’ (i.e. found things that I had forgotten I had bought):

• Two AIRFIX Opel truck and towed PAK40 75mm anti-tank gun kits
• Two AIRFIX StuG III assault gun kits
• Four AIRFIX Bren Gun Carrier and towed 6pdr anti-tank gun kits
• A ‘spare’ copy of the HORDES OF THE THINGS rules book
• Some 10cm-long pieces of N gauge railway track, two small N gauge buildings, and two pieces of N gauge rolling stock
• Several rolls of dolls house 'grass' (this is like the normal grass matting used to cover model railway and wargames terrain but it has a self-adhesive backing)

The room now looks a lot better than it did – I find the process of tidying up strangely therapeutic – and I can go to the small wargames show that SELWG (South East London Wargames Group) are organising tomorrow at Firepower (the Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich) with a reasonably clear conscience.

* This is an old naval expression for time that sailors were given to make and repair their own clothes. In recent times it has come to mean time off (usually an afternoon) away from work, to ‘do your own thing’.